Googling for Gold!

Where was you money on the morning of Aug 19, 2004?

In case you don't recognize the date, that's the day three years ago when Google (GOOG) became a public company after selling 22.5 million shares of stock at the now laughable price of $85.

So much has change since then, Google then the relatively new search company was actually 3 years old back then and had about 35% of the search market and was generating nearly a billion dollars a year from delivering ads and related Web links alongside search results.

Many people thought that Google maybe a good investment, they've never imagined the 478% return on the IPO price, now Google trades around 500$ a share.

And while Google had introduced a handful of tools, including a blogging tool, that suggested it had ambitions well beyond bread-and-butter search, few investors could have predicted how powerful, expansive, and successful the company would become. In the past three years, Google has grown from a simple search engine worth around $30 billion to a $160 billion advertising and information behemoth, both online and off. In addition to steadily advancing toward its oft-stated goal of indexing the world's information, the company has evolved into a Web software provider, e-mail service, a destination for video and multimedia, an online payments service, and a clearinghouse for all manner of online print and radio advertising, to name only a few of the areas it has begun to influence.

In the three years since the IPO, Google has made history and is now dominating the search engine market, as well as the online advertising business, here are some major mile stones the company has been through these years:

• June 28, 2005
  Google launched its Earth mapping service on June 28, 2005. Unlike the leading mapping services at the time, Google Earth is much more than a source for local information and driving directions, it changed the entire game, as it lets Web surfers explore their world via their computer screen, flying over continents with the help of a satellite and zooming in on everything from skyscrapers to rooftop sunbathers.
• Nov. 16, 2005
  Google finally launched Google Base. Over time, Google Base has evolved into a site that can turn up the heat on eBay, the online marketplace. In June, 2006, Google launched its Checkout payment service to compete with eBay's PayPal and other online payment services.
• Fall, 2005
  Google made a giant leap toward its goal of bringing all the world's information online. Google signed a deal to scan key collections in some of the world's largest university libraries. The goal for the project is to let users search books online for relevant information or to search for titles by text within the book.
• Nov. 17, 2005
  After a report showing better-than-forecast earnings, Google’s shares broke the $400 mark. Third-quarter results that year were the latest evidence that marketers were spending more of their advertising budgets online.
• March, 2006
  In March, 2006, Google launched a finance site that directly competes with Yahoo's leading financial information site. Google also makes enhancements to its search offerings, such as integrating maps with local search and adding a blog search tool. Google soon captured nearly 50% of all U.S. Web searches.

• Oct. 9, 2006 In a move that gave Google the scale needed to become a heavy hitter in online video, it acquired leading video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion on Oct. 9, 2006. YouTube's considerable benefits came with the drawback of exposing Google to greater risk of copyright infringement lawsuits from content owners who long criticized YouTube for failing to keep their material off its pages.

• Oct. 10, 2006
  One day after the YouTube purchase, Google entered the business software market, launching free online document and spreadsheet programs. The move was seen as a direct challenge to Microsoft's dominance of the market for desktop business applications.
• April, 2007
  Google announced plans to buy DoubleClick, a leading player in the online ad-serving business, for $3.1 billion. The acquisition promises to help Google extend its dominance of the online search advertising arena into the market for online ads that run in fixed places on sites. This same month, Google began selling television advertising through a partnership with EchoStar's Dish Network.

So what's next? I think Google's next move is to conquer the internet itself in a form of offering internet access to the masses free of charge. As we said reported last month Google had been in talks to with the government to spend $4.6 billion on wireless airwaves if the Federal Communications Commission adopted certain positions deemed favorable to new Internet service providers. I Guess will ll' just have to wait and see for ourselves what will come out of this.